THE MEMORY TREE
By John R. Little
Part 1
One always begins to forget a place as soon as it’s left behind.
Charles Dickens
Chapter 1
I was 52 years old the first time I dissolved.
I didn’t know what was happening, but a part of me thought it was a heart attack. Here I was, an out-of-shape cigarette smoker, twenty pounds overweight, maybe thirty. No exercise, greasy food to the max. And, let’s not forget a high-stress job and genetic predisposition.
I was at work when it happened. Leaning over my cluttered desk, staring at my computer screen, pretending to care about the icons staring back at me, the graphs and the numbers spilling down the screen like little drops of rain splashing down into gutters on a cool summer
night. It had been a long time since I cared enough about my clients to worry about the market being up or down, and those streaming stock quotes just didn’t grab my interest the way they once did.
The first sensation started somewhere in the middle of a burst of Nasdaq quotes, a continuous circle of ticker symbols from Amazon to Yahoo and back.
The word “pain” isn’t quite right for what I felt. Not in the beginning. It started with a shortness of breath and a tingling sensation in my chest. I remember feeling surprised, wondering briefly if the cheeseburger and fries I had scarfed down at lunch were starting to back up on me.
The stinging in my chest shifted and moved throughout my entire body. I was shocked into attention. As I held my arm up, I could see small green and white pinches of light covering my skin, miniature silent explosions. When each tiny flash was gone, so was the underlying skin. My body was being eaten away in small bits and pieces, and that scared me more than even a real heart attack would have. What kind of disease does that?
Fifty-two years old. I was way too young to die, wasn’t I? Especially like this, having my body suddenly betray me and fall to bits and pieces. Fifty-two . . . was too young. It didn’t even come close to being “old” these days.
My father was old when he died at 59, really old. Mom was old when she passed on a year later. But now, I was still young. Not like them.
I heard a thin unrecognizable voice I somehow knew was my own. “Jenny.” I couldn’t leave Jenny, my wife. In just a few seconds, visions of wills, insurance, and other unfinished end-of-life business flew through my mind like the stock market quotes I had just been studying. A streaming mess I was leaving behind for Jenny.
My whole body started to wrack with an uncontrollable quaking. Although everything must have happened over the span of only a few seconds, it felt like an eternity to me. I could feel my entire body starting to shift and dissolve, pieces of me falling apart into a celestial meat grinder.
Each vanishing cell screamed out to me. I could smell my burning flesh disappearing.
I tried to call for help, but only a tiny whisper escaped the remains of my lips. My assistant, Shelley, was only ten feet away, sitting just outside my office, but her back was to me, and she didn’t hear a word. She was yawning and brushing her hair absently, killing time in her boring dead-end job as she seemed to do more and more these days.
I couldn’t breathe; too many cells had evaporated from my lungs.
Tears wound down my cheeks and little whimpers fell from my mouth, hovering around me.
I fought to stand up, figuring I could walk out to Shelley and get her help. I pushed up, but nothing happened. My butt stayed nailed to my ergonomically correct chair. I had often joked that I would never die of bad posture.
I tried one more time, and the chair popped out from underneath me, clattering against the back wall. Without any support, I collapsed onto the floor and passed out.
This is what it’s like to die, I thought. At least it went fast.
#
Nobody was more surprised than me when I lived to see another day. I quit smoking and started exercising. It didn’t help.
Since then, I’ve had several other “episodes” over a six-month period. I still don’t even know what to call these things. The only word that seems to accurately describe the sensation is “dissolving.” The last time was two years ago, and it appears I’m over that phase of my life. The doctors were all mystified, but not as mystified as I was.
What they saw and tried to diagnose was something completely different from what I felt and experienced. Shelley did hear my chair banging back behind me, and she screamed. Fortunately, others came and saw me crushed to the floor.
Nobody saw bright green flashes or dissolving flesh. They thought I had just dropped dead. When someone checked, they found a pulse and very shallow respiration -- shallow, but there.
I stayed in a coma for a week.
When I awoke . . . well, I’ll get to that in due course. The only thing that matters is that when all was said and done, I had experienced a remarkable set of events. Jenny and I decided I should write the story down, hoping that by having the details etched into these pages, by taking the time to document each and every step, perhaps we would find some meaning in the entire experience.
We’ll see.
Here is my story.
*********************
Chapter 2
Okay, how to start? First, my name. Samuel Julius Ellis. My mother called me Sammy when she was alive. My father, Sam. Samuel was my grandfather’s name on my mother’s side. I didn’t know where Julius came from.
I had one brother, Marty. He was five years older than I was and named after a fashion for my mother’s mother (Mary). All four of my grandparents died of heart attacks before I really knew them. Marty was a decent enough brother, but the age difference was really a very large gulf for us to bridge, and we had little to do with each other. He alone would call me by my middle name, Julius, as if I needed a more exotic name, to not be just a common old Sam. Even though he was only a shadow wandering in and out of my life, I was immensely proud of him. My big brother.
Marty had a dog. He found it out in the fields one day and brought it home. Nobody knew who it belonged to, and that usually meant somebody had abandoned it. He was a cross between a spaniel and a collie. Mostly black with splotches of white. Marty named him Scout. He was old, almost ready to die, and he did die a few years later. It seemed he had no reason to live when Marty himself was dead.
When I was young, I was a reader. I was always wandering around with a book or two under my arm, and the librarians all knew me. Of course, in a small town like Nelson, Montana, it wasn’t like there were a million kids wandering the stacks. It didn’t take long to recognize the same skinny little kid who kept coming in. I grew my potbelly much later in life.
So, I read a lot. My friends thought it was geeky. They nicknamed me Shakespeare, and that got quickly shortened to Shakey, at least for a few summers.
My mom would scowl and scrunch up her nose whenever my friends called me that. Fortunately, my mother and my friends almost never crossed paths. I hated my parents and would never deliberately bring friends over.
Now, when I say I hated my parents, you might nod and think you understand, but you don’t. I mean, I really hated them.
My father was a drunken asshole. He beat me, yelled at me, and turned me into a terrified little boy, who had no place to hide at home, and who instead hid in the library, the school, or on the baseball field. Anywhere but home.
My mom was drunk as often as my dad was, but she never hit me. I don’t even think she liked watching him do it, and maybe that’s why she was pissed to the gills as often as he was. Sometimes I wonder if she was as big a victim as me. It didn’t matter. I hated her for being there and doing nothing.
I almost never saw my mother smile. She was pretty, even as she aged, and when she did give me a smile, it was like the sun shining after a month of gray rain. I always wished to see that smile more than I ever really did.
Nelson, Montana in the late sixties: at thirty-five thousand people, it wasn’t a thriving metropolis, but it was a great place to be a kid, especially in the summer. The sun was always big and hot, and the world hadn’t lost its innocence yet. The streets were safe, we thought, nobody locked their doors, and kids stayed out playing pickup baseball till ten o’clock each night. The sky was clear, the crickets and cicadas filled the air with songs, and the light breeze coming in from the surrounding grain fields gave a wonderful yeasty smell to the city that grew stronger and stronger until summertime gave way to the autumn harvests.
In 1968, I was thirteen. I hit puberty and learned to masturbate. They never told us anything about this in school. I learned mostly by accident.
Images from my summer life at thirteen: baseball; basketball; reading; riding my bike out to the distant fields and drinking a Coke or two beside a countryside filled with golden wheat; breaking windows in abandoned houses; being a charter member of the Beauty Shop Gang (more on that later); shoplifting my first pack of cigarettes with my buddy Mel and almost puking my guts out when I smoked them.
And: a bleeding ear from being hit with an old wooden yardstick; a broken finger from being knocked down a flight of stairs; time spent hiding under my bed, hoping against hope my dad wouldn’t come find me when I could hear him yelling downstairs; being ridiculed by him as a
fucked-up shit in front of my brother. I wasn’t even overweight then. It didn’t matter. Nothing I could ever do would please my father.
The year before, my dad had knocked my mother down the stairs, too, and he’d broken three of her ribs. He thought it was funny until he sobered up. I heard her bounce down the hardwood stairs, a thumping that woke me up in the middle of the night.
I still hear those bounces late at night, my imagination creating the pictures in my mind I never witnessed in reality.
But, when he did sober up, my father was the nicest man in the world. He treated me with kindness, and he was pleased with me wanting to go to university instead of being a farmer or working in a fast-food restaurant. He loved my brother and me equally in those rare moments of sobriety. He really had this Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. Hyde almost always won.
One of my favorite memories of my childhood is about my father. It was a Sunday morning one summer, early, maybe seven, eight o’clock. I was sitting on the front stoop, just killing time, watching traffic go by, another paperback mystery novel dangling in my hands. The transistor radio was on in the kitchen, and tinny music drifted out to me. The city seemed at peace, and so did my family. Only my dad and I were awake, me on the porch, he making a cup of coffee for himself.
After a while, he came out and sat beside me. I tensed for a moment, checking to be sure it was coffee in his hand, not whiskey. “Hey, Sam, whatcha reading today?”
I showed him the Agatha Christie. “Just an old mystery.”
He nodded. “Never had much time to read myself.” Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. He had lots of time. He just chose to spend it getting drunk.
A song by The Beatles came on the radio, and we could hear it in the background. Nelson hadn’t woken yet. There was no traffic to drown out the sound. I hadn’t really listened to the lyrics of “When I’m 64” much. I liked most Beatles’ songs, but this one had flown below my radar. In the silence, I listened to the song along with my father. It was a sad song filled with wonderings, Lennon (or was it McCartney?) wondering whether his true love would be there for him, helping him, loving him, when he was sixty-four.
My dad looked at me and gently touched my thigh. I was wearing brown shorts. “You’re getting to be a tall bugger,” he said. There was a touch of sadness to his voice. Melancholy. I smiled at him, wanting so much to please him. I wasn’t afraid of him that morning. He’d start in with the whiskey shortly, but for now, the coffee cup in his hand provided the protection I needed.
He said, “You like that song?”
“Yeah, sure.” I knew he didn’t get The Beatles. Not many of my friends’ parents did, either. “It’s got a nice bounce to it.”
He nodded and took another sip of his coffee. “Will you take care of me when I’m sixty-four?” He seemed to blink away a tear. The thought of me taking care of him sounded ludicrous. He would always be the one to take care of me, wouldn’t he?
I must have looked stunned.
“That’s if’n I last to sixty-four, of course,” he said with a bitter laugh.
He didn’t.
My father died of lung cancer when he was fifty-nine. I didn’t go to his funeral.
*********************
Chapter 3
I moved away from Nelson at the first possible
chance -- the end of high school. Montana wasn’t for me. Too rural, too close to my father. The vision of the future landscaping my mind included a large city, cosmopolitan, exciting, full of opportunities. Having grown up in a town that was more country than city caused my dreams to pull in the opposite direction. I watched the allure of Times Square every New Year’s Eve, when the silvery ball lowered itself to bring in the new year. I loved the lights, the billboards, the throngs of people. That’s where I was sure I belonged. Away from my father, far from everything bad that had happened.
When high school did end in 1973, I attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where I studied Economics and Business. It wasn’t New York City, but it was still a big step up from Nelson. I’m not quite sure even now why I picked Economics and Business. It seemed like a crapshoot, each subject just as unlikely to be enjoyable as the next. I just grabbed something that sounded like it might use some math; I was good at math.
I did like my courses, though, and I surprised myself by graduating first in my class. Straight A’s.
Moving to Seattle was one of the biggest changes in my life. It was five hundred miles from Montana, far enough to eventually put a dent in the memories of my childhood.
When I left Nelson, I drove a 1952 Chevy, a light-blue clunker I had picked up from the father of a friend for two hundred bucks. All the way west, I wondered if the car would make it. As it turned out, the car lasted me another five years and never cost me a dime in repairs.
The trip itself was a blur. I didn’t appreciate the scenery and barely remember anything except sleeping in the car the first night, just pulled over on the side of the highway, waking up cramped and cold and wondering if I had made a huge mistake in leaving home.
Everything turned around as soon as I hit the west coast.
Mrs. Clawson ran a boarding house in Everett, a clean, quiet suburb of Seattle. She had a spare room on the top floor of her sprawling two-and-a-half story home, and I lived there for three years, until I finished my studies.
She was a stern woman but kind. When I first met her, she was about forty but seemed much older. You could tell just with a quick glance that she had lived a hard life. I don’t think I ever saw her smile. Her hair was prematurely gray, and the wrinkles in her face were etched by worry and hardship. Her husband had abandoned her shortly after their daughter, Jenny, was born.
Mrs. Clawson had initially rented out her own bedroom in the small bungalow she lived in, while she herself slept on a living room couch, scrimped and saved, and eventually was able to afford the nice home she now owned. She still rented rooms, still saving every penny.
Her house was large and rambling. In Nelson, we would have called it a mansion. In Everett, it just fit in with all its neighbors. Off-white with olive green trim. The lawn was neat, and so was everything inside. The house reflected Mrs. Clawson’s personality. Clean, organized. Everything in its place.
And then there was Jenny.
Mrs. Clawson had mentioned a daughter, but I lived in the house for almost two weeks before I met her, realized she was my age -- eighteen -- and found she was absolutely drop-dead stunning. When I first saw her, she was sitting on the front porch, reading. Her feet were absently swinging beneath her. She stood up, smiled, and said, “You must be Sam. I’m Jenny.” My heart jumped alive with a beat of its own accord.
It took me a moment to collect my wits enough to answer, “Hey. Nice to meet you.”
She laughed -- a wondrous laugh that caught me off guard. She had long, chestnut hair woven into a tight ponytail reaching halfway down her back. I couldn’t help but stare at her. She had the brightest smile and laughing dark-brown eyes, eyes that captured me and wouldn’t let go. Her lips were wide and full of life, just like the rest of her. Little wire-frame glasses perched on her nose, and a pink dress just covered her knees. Below that were short white socks and brown sandals where her toes peeked out.
At that moment, I imagined spending the rest of my life with this girl. I’d never been so overwhelmed by anybody. Never before, never since, had I felt so absolutely lost. Before we spoke another dozen sentences to each other, I could tell she was as smitten with me as I was with her.
I can still see her face as it was that day, the slight tilting of her head as the radio played Elton John’s “ Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” in the background, and the smell of the petunias surrounding the deck permeating the air.
“So Sam, sit down and tell me something about yourself.”
I did.
I told her about Nelson, about my brother, a bit about my mother. Somehow, my father didn’t seem to enter my thoughts. I told her about my dreams of living in a big city, of making a difference (whatever that meant), of wanting to see the world, of wanting to go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve and Rio de Janeiro during Mardi Gras and the markets of Cairo and Bangkok. I told her about wanting to do everything.
She laughed and nodded, and before I knew it an hour had passed and I was holding her hand.
She told me all about herself, too -- book lover, wants to travel, her father’s death, no siblings, good mother.
Hell, we even talked about how neither of us wanted children later in life. We both wanted our freedom.
We both knew with a snap that we were meant to be together. I was happy for the first time in longer than I could remember.
This was the girl I was to marry in less than four years. And in less than five, I would be beating her.
